Saturday, 16 April 2011

Linda Linda Linda - Filmhouse - 5/2/11

I was in a band once.

I was.

Oh, you can laugh and crack jokes but the fact remains that I was in a band.

We wrote our own songs, we didn't do covers, we played gigs.

What did I do?

Singer.

Frontman.

Leader.

I mean, I say "singer" but that is stretching things a little...what I actually did was to honk like a seal doing an impersonation of Morrissey if Morrissey was tone-deaf (no jokes about Morrissey actually being tone-deaf please).

It was fun.

I had all the delusions that everyone else who has been in a band has...stardom, fame, women, front cover of the NME, spokesman for a generation.

It all ended quite badly and I haven't spoken to anyone in the band for over 15 years.

I'm a man who knows how to hold a grudge.

"Linda Linda Linda" is a Japanese film that captures perfectly what it is like to be young and in a band. It's not achingly cool, it's not knowing, it isn't "dark", there aren't "layers"...it's just a film about four girls who form a band and who play at the end of term show.

It's uplifting and it is, at times, hilarious.

The title comes from the name of a song played by Japanese punks "The Blue Hearts" which is the song the girls decide to cover as part of their set. It's a fabulous pop-punk song and when sung by adolescent girls it is given a glorious shot of emotion.

The girls in the band are not stereotypes...yes, one of the girls is a Korean who struggles with Japanese but she isn't geeky or awkward, there isn't a Spice Girls parade of sporty, ginger, baby, scary or dopey! What you get instead is four girls dealing with the reality of being teenagers and chasing a simple dream.